Ooh, Baby, Ooooh wee!

Ooh, baby, oooooh wee!

It’s that Million Dollar Bash.

I hear that chorus and I’m smiling. It’s a celebration, a party. Dylan and the boys are off the hard road, and they’re just having fun in the Big Pink basement with the Revox tape recorder.  There has been some interpretative gobble dee gook about it being Dylan’s satirical payback to Andy Warhol and his pretentious Factory parties, with a salvo to Edie Sedgwick - the (“big dumb blonde) -, who dumped him, but really, that feels like a stretch. Those intimations might be there, but when Bob sings:

“Well, I’m hittin’ it too hard, my stones won’t take-

I get up in the morning but it’s too early to wake,

First it’s hello, goodbye, then push and then crash,

But we’re all gonna make it at that mIllion dollar bash!

It feels to me like an expression of sweet release. An appreciation for the moment at hand. And, imagining where the heads of the bar band turned folk-rock players assembled in that bucolic place were at…. -, the men who, for me, comprised the greatest American band in rock history - in the chrysalis from which they were about to emerge to ignite a musical revolution - I can feel the spontaneous energy of joyous creation. 

Oooh baby, Oooh weeeee!